


I See You

by AnnaTheFallen



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: F/M, Mental Health Issues, Psychosis, Suicide Attempt, Swearing, Violence, lots of triggers folks, psychiatric facility, psychiatry, self injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 23:46:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11793972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaTheFallen/pseuds/AnnaTheFallen
Summary: Nathan Harris stumbles upon a kindred spirit in a treatment facility and they battle the odds - and the nurses - to stick together. (Contains disturbing content related to mental illness and suicide.)





	I See You

**Author's Note:**

> It was heavily implied onscreen that Nathan Harris was supposed to be locked up in a psychiatric hospital for an indefinite period of time (ie, forever), but since psychotic urges and intrusive thoughts are manageable with medication and therapy, that explanation struck me as a lazy way to make a really interesting character go away. I wrote this first chapter in three days, fueled by rage! You think you put Nathan Harris away? You thought wrong, motherf3&#er.

**_“One person's craziness is another person's reality.”_ **

**_― Tim Burton_ **

****

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               Getting dumped in a hospital turned out to be a major trigger for what I knew at the time to be my own, particularly intense brand of anger issues. I mean, I signed myself in… technically. I’d argue there was a strong theme of coercion throughout my entire treatment there. My parents and doctors made all kinds of threats about what would happen if I didn’t go into the Kaplan-Jones program. I was told they’d have me forcibly committed to an actual psychiatric hospital (which was bullshit, because I wasn’t nearly enough of a danger to anyone for that and those places are already short on beds), that they’d call the police (an empty threat, since the police would have entered the house to find a perfectly normal-looking 18-year-old girl watching Netflix), that they’d kick me out of the house (I happen to know my family actually prefers me alive), and other sundry words of blackmail. I was too far gone at the time I went into Kaplan-Jones to think clearly enough or even really get out of bed for long enough to dispute any of those things.

So, there I was, my luggage standing in the middle of a bedroom with a queen bed, a dresser, and its own adjoining bathroom. I was too pissed off to admire the facilities. My vision had gone white and red and brown all through the car ride there. I was preoccupied thinking of all the horrible things I’d do to everyone if I could, slitting throats and stabbing with various implements, kicking and strangling and bludgeoning specific people into submission. _If one more person touches me_ , I thought, over and over again, the thought always finished by a violent fantasy. That was pretty normal for me.

I was a raw nerve for the first four days there, four days that faded into a blur of blood and urine tests, blood pressure checks, and fits of anger. As soon as my parents left me there, I fell down on the bed, crying. Every time a nurse or doctor spoke to me, it was all I could do not to scream. I needed to scream. The head of the program summoned me directly to his office on the third day, just to threaten to send me to the actual hospital if I didn’t get my act together and stop talking about wanting to be dead. It didn’t make me want to injure him any less.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

On the fifth night, I sat on the bed and reluctantly opened my DBT binder (If we missed a day of our feelings chart, they gave us a stern interrogation in front of the rest of the patients, so that we’d all fall in line).

               “Pouring out your deepest fears?” came a thin, tired voice from the half-open door.

               My head jerked up. There was a boy standing in my bedroom doorway, leaning haphazardly against the doorframe. “I hate DBT,” I said.

               “Me too,” said the boy. “Sometimes I just can’t do the skills. They don’t work.”

               I studied the interloper. He was skinny and pale, and he had big, blue eyes, eyelids raw and red from crying or lack of sleep. He had a mop of wavy brown hair that spilled over his left eyebrow and stuck up in the back, suggesting that somewhere along his personal journey, the ritual of combing his hair had fallen by the wayside. Hesitantly, I volunteered, “Yeah, things get in the way.” I narrowed my eyes. I still hadn’t decided whether I was okay with the intrusion, but he didn’t look particularly threatening.

               “I’m really not a fan of the group therapy thing, either,” he said.

I barked a humorless laugh. “Expert advice from such brilliant medical minds as Bill the Major Depressive from Down the Hall and Maria who Leaves her Shit in the Dryer for Way Too Long.” The rage hit me again, for just a few seconds. I imagined ripping the door off its hinges and tearing the wallpaper in my assigned bedroom to shreds with a pair of scissors. _Why am I talking to him?_ It wasn’t as if he’d understand any better than anyone else in the building.

The corners of his mouth twitched a little. He ran a hand through his messy hair. “Is that whose underwear I found in the laundry room?”

“Almost definitely.” The shared humor defused the bubble of rage before it could make me lose any control.

               It looked like he was going to say something else, but a nurse butted in and kicked him out of my room. “9:00 is the suggested lights-out time,” she told me, steering the boy out into the hallway.

I rolled my eyes and tossed the binder onto the floor. They could lampoon me in group tomorrow if they wanted to. I curled up on top of the bedspread and stared at the grey wall of my room, running scenarios in my head alternately of how I’d destroy the room and kill the staff, and of how that boy could have made it to the ultimate purgatory, until the new medication they’d given me knocked me out.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               In the middle of the night I woke up feeling off. It was 3:00am and I was angry. I needed something, but I wasn’t sure what, so I went to get water from the cooler in the hall. A nurse approached me from behind and whispered, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

               That startled me, so I jumped, dropped a cup full of water onto the rug and all over my feet, and growled at her, “Personal space, you stupid fuck.”

               Wide-eyed and backing away, she said, “Okay, let us know if we can help with anything.”

               The boy from my doorway the night before was standing in the doorway to the pantry.

               “What?” I said as I passed him in the hall.

               “You’re really angry,” he observed.

               “And you’re really creepy.”

               “I’m just saying, I get it,” he said.

               I mumbled, “Sure you do,” and disappeared into my room.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

My alarm went off at 7:00am. My bleary eyes panned across the bedside table. Still uncoordinated and half-asleep, my hand knocked over a tube of chapstick and an empty disposable water bottle before it clumsily grabbed hold of my phone to turn off the music that meant it was time to leave the warm, comfortable hollow in my bed and get dressed to go down the freezing hall for therapy at 8:00 in the goddamn morning.

               I had brought makeup with me in my luggage, but there was something profoundly futile about putting on eyeliner to eat shitty food at a dining table with a bunch of lunatics before the sun had even come up. Amanda, a fair-haired patient about my age, battled the depressing vibe and unfortunate selection of décor on the ward by dressing to impress and applying sparkly eyeliner every morning. It was all I could do to muster the energy to put on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt before breakfast.

               Sitting around that breakfast table, I scanned all the faces there. Most people were deliberately focusing on their plates, but a few momentarily locked eyes with me. I tried to guess which ones had cried themselves to sleep. The boy from the night before shuffled into the common room. He half-nodded his head at me. He seemed to harbor no ill will.

               “Did you order breakfast?” said the nurse beside the clunky cart that had borne the crappy food up from the hell it originated in, brow furrowed as she pored over a list. “I don’t think we have a tray for you.”

               “I don’t eat breakfast,” said the boy. He was wearing tailored jeans and a button-down shirt, like a J. Crew catalog. Suddenly, a little eyeliner didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

               “You should eat breakfast,” said the nurse, missing the point. “There are energy bars in the pantry.”

               “Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” said the boy, patiently. He took a seat on the couch and the nurse shrugged, shook her head, and dragged the cart back to the kitchen.

               I finished my cereal before anyone could speak to me and cleared my dishes in the sink around the corner. Then, I took a seat on the opposite side of the couch from the gaunt, if fashionable, boy. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing, not the pristine skin of a J. Crew catalog model, but thick, red scars. A chill went up my spine, and not just because it was below 35 degrees outside. My eyes darted down at my own scarred arms. The oldest were white, the newer ones red. Mine were a lot smaller, and there were a lot more of them. I peeked at his arms again. Those scars weren’t just wide and long; they were also haphazard. They were vicious.

               “You can ask, you know,” he said, defeated, throwing the magazine he was reading down onto the coffee table.

               I was startled. “What?”

               “The scars. You’re staring.”

               “I… uh… Sorry.” I got up and hurried out of the room. _Abort mission._

As I was swallowing my medication in front of the nursing station, someone cleared their throat behind me. “I was trying to die,” said the boy. His voice was so quiet, so insubstantial.

               I turned slowly to face him.

               “Hi, my name’s Nathan and I tried to kill myself,” he said, offering his hand to shake.

               I stared at him like a deer in the headlights for a moment before I shook his hand. “Hi,” I said, following his format. “I’m Jordan and I’m the angriest person I know.”

               “Well, now, you’re the second-angriest,” he said.

               “I find that very hard to believe.”

               “Are you gonna apologize to that nurse from last night?” he teased.

               I rolled my eyes. “Sure, if you can tell me which one it was.”

               He snorted. “Never mind.”

               At that moment, a nurse power-walked down the entire hall with a clipboard, calling out the approaching start time of DBT group. A flash of white and a momentary fantasy of bludgeoning the nurse into oblivion with a baseball bat coursed through my veins.

“It’s too early for this,” said Nathan. I barely heard him.

               They did, indeed, put me in the hot seat about why I didn’t fill out the entire mood log, but it wasn’t so bad, because even as the whiteness closed in around my vision and my body constricted in preparation for containing a bout of writhing and yelling, Nathan sat next to me and drew cartoons of the doctors with their heads inflating and flying away like balloons. The caricatures gave me something to focus on besides the knot of white-hot rage in my chest.

Wordlessly, Nathan slipped me the paper in the hallway after the session.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

By then, most of the shell-shock from being dumped in the hospital had worn off, and some of the anger was ebbing away. So, y’know, there I was, just kind of… sitting around in this weird, liminal space full of people who all seemed perfectly normal, but off, somehow. It was unsettling. There was a guy who freely discussed his diagnosis of “bipolar with psychotic features” and worked out with annoying consistency. “You should join us for a morning workout sometime,” he said to me.

_I’ll tell you where you can shove your workout_ , I thought, smiling and nodding at him. It was all I could do to get out of bed to shuffle down the hall to get my medication; a workout was out of the question.

I later found out that guy had been hospitalized for months after the voices from the television told him to kick his wife and five-year-old son out of the house and slash one of his wrists. I guess the workout routine was all he had left. His name was Josh.

There was a girl who couldn’t seem to smile at first, but after a few days, stunned all of us with the energy and positivity she radiated. Her name was Charlotte. She was effervescent. She was also too depressed to go to work or pay her rent, and thus, had nothing to go home to. She missed her dog, who was safe at her mother’s house. I marveled at the brave face she put on, even in the hospital. It was a lie, of course, but still, I wished I could lie like that. I tried smiling in the mirror one night after dinner, trying to stretch my muscles like she did and mold my face into a facsimile of happiness, but my skin was so pale and the circles under my eyes were prominent, like bruises. The overhead lighting in the bathroom cast ghoulish shadows down my face. I didn’t feel convincing. I felt stupid.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               During the second week of my stay at Kaplan-Jones, Nathan and I became allies against the absolute bullshit thrown our way on a daily basis. This was probably partially because none of the other patients seemed to think it _was_ bullshit. Having our vitals measured twice a day, having to flag down a nurse just to get my own meds, the DBT methods that only seemed to alienate the two of us from the rest of the group…

               One day after dinner, when we were doodling on either end of the same page, Nathan summarized it better than I could: “Doesn’t anyone else think this place is weird and creepy?”

               “I’m here to get treatment,” said Maria, a 27-year-old woman with a nasally voice, from an armchair nearby. “If you’re not here to get treatment, then why are you here?”

               I bristled at the intrusion, partially because she’d made a good point, but also because of her haughty demeanor. I was about to say something nasty and get myself in trouble, but Nathan put his hand on top of mine and twisted around to address her himself. “It’s the only way they’d let me see the light of day again, after what the FBI found in my house,” he said, ominously. He turned back around and continued drawing.

               Maria got up and left the room pretty soon after that, and as soon as she was gone, I allowed the laughter to explode out of me. “That was amazing.”

               “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” he mumbled.

               “Are you ever going to tell me…”

               “No,” he said. “I don’t need you to hate me.”

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               My alarm went off, and I opened my eyes, but I didn’t move. I just let it go off. A nurse peeked into my room at 7:00am and then retreated. I shut off the alarm. I took a deep breath. Outside my door, I could hear the beginnings of activity. A few doors closed, and people murmured in the hall. A drop of saltwater escaped my eye and rolled down my cheek and into my hair. I went into the bathroom and started to wash my face, but somewhere in between lathering and rinsing, all the weight of the world that I’d been avoiding dropped onto my shoulders. I fell to my knees on the tile, body racked by heaving sobs. I cried for 15 minutes into a towel.

               I was dressed, and I was going through the motions of my schedule, but I felt hollow. Nothing mattered anymore. I caught Nathan scrutinizing my body language a bunch of times throughout the morning. “Are you okay?” he said in a low voice as we ate breakfast side by side.

               “Not enough sleep?” Josh interjected, trying to make conversation at the table. It was silent save for the sounds of silverware. Josh hated silence, and he took every opportunity to fill it.

               “Yeah, tired,” I said in a monotone.

               Nathan didn’t look convinced, but he dropped it.

               My psychiatrist had written me a prescription for a new medication, which the nurses dispensed to me for the second time that morning. I swallowed the pills without a complaint. I don’t even remember what they looked like. I complied with every request during the mindfulness exercises (That morning, we were supposed to be writing our names forward and backward with our non-dominant hands. Every time I struggled with the exercise, I found myself whimpering.). All through group therapy, I stared at the brick wall behind the therapist’s head. My eyes felt raw from the tears I’d stopped even trying to wipe off my face.

               When the session was over and we’d heard plenty about Charlotte’s parents and Josh’s marriage counseling, I stayed behind in the empty room. I paced in circles within the big ring of burgundy leather sofas. I wondered how they got the design into the rug.

               “Jordan.”

               I turned around to see who had disturbed my quiet, but it was just Nathan. “Hey.” I continued walking in my circle around the room. I liked the high ceiling. It was like freedom.

               He stood directly in my path and set both hands firmly but gently on my shoulders. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

               “No.” I started crying again. Curse those blue eyes. _He could probably make me do anything with those eyes,_ I thought as I fell into his arms. I couldn’t stop crying.

               “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “You’re okay, I’ve got you.” He held me tighter. “Do you want me to get someone?”

               “No.” It was supposed to be “no,” but it sounded like a strangled sob to me. I guess he understood, though.

               We stood there for a long time, and I cried my eyes out, and I just let him hold me until I was too worn out to cry anymore. “Do you wanna sit outside?” he said. I nodded my head against his chest.

               As he was signing us out to sit on the patio, the nurse in the booth at the front desk said, “DBT group starts in a few minutes.”

               “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Do you see her?” growled Nathan, gesturing toward my general person.

               I was staring into space. My face must have been a mess because, as fortune would have it, _that_ was the day I’d decided to wear eyeliner. There was a big wet spot and a black smudge on Nathan’s shoulder. I was too exhausted to be embarrassed. I can only assume the nurse could observe my vacant expression and fucked-up mascara from where she sat, because she waved us on through.

               The patio was out back, through a metal door and down some wooden stairs. It was surrounded by an eight-foot brick wall and populated by several plastic lawn chairs, a wooden gazebo, and some dead shrubs. Cozy, right? It was mostly there so the smokers on the ward could get their nicotine fix, which they did, even in below-zero weather.

               Nathan guided the shell that used to be me over to a bench in the gazebo. “Tell me if you get cold, okay?”

               “’Kay.” For the dead of winter, it was unseasonably warm. The snow on the walls and the roof of the gazebo was melting. I’d say 45 or 50 degrees, but honestly, I was probably too far gone to be any reliable judge of the weather. The chill still shocked my system.

               Nathan was sitting across from me, studying me. “Listen, Jordan,” he said, after a few minutes. “Didn’t you say your doctor put you on a new medication?”

               “Um…” Trying to remember was making my eyes tear up again. “Y-yeah. I started on it yesterday.”

               He moved closer to where I was sitting and fixed me with an intense, grave expression. “Who’s your doctor?”

               “Lewandowski.”

               He seemed pensive for a moment, and then he stood up. “Are you okay here for a bit?”

               “Yeah.” I’d started crying again. Nathan draped his jacket over my shoulders and went back inside.

               Some time later, a nurse came out and led me inside by the arm. It must have been a lot later, because it was getting dark outside as we ascended the wooden steps to the building. “Where’s Nathan?” I asked the nurse. My voice sounded frail and shaky. I could feel another bout of crying descending rapidly upon me. My fingers clutched at the jacket around my shoulders.

               “Don’t worry about him. Let’s just get you inside, okay?”

               The nurse walked me all the way back to my room and then brought me my medication instead of letting me get it from the nursing station myself, which tipped me off to something not right. She suggested I go to bed early. “What did Nathan do?” I said, as she was leaving me.

               She swallowed uncomfortably. “We made you an appointment to speak to Dr. Lewandowsky about your medication tomorrow. Don’t worry about that right now, okay? Just try to get some rest, sweetie.” She closed the door behind her.

               Crying and confused, I curled up and went to sleep dressed and still wearing makeup, with Nathan’s brown leather jacket draped over me.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               I woke up the next morning without the aid of an alarm. The sound of a bustling mental facility outside my door was enough. I looked down; I was still wearing the same jeans, flannel shirt, and even my shoes from the day before. I checked my phone. It was already 7:30. I stumbled into the bathroom. “Oh, god,” I mouthed, surveying the leftover eyeliner smudges from the day before. My hair stuck up where I’d slept on it. I scrubbed my face clean, passively hoping my pores would be forgiving of my skincare indiscretion.

               I opened my door a crack and peered out. I was still trying to piece together what had happened the day before. There were so many holes in my memory. I remembered crying a lot, in a lot of different places… and I remembered Nathan with his arms around me in the group therapy room… _Oh no_. Nathan had disappeared.

               With a pit in my stomach and the persistent feeling that something bad had happened, I ventured out of the room and tripped over… “Nathan?”

               “Ow,” he yelped as my knee collided with his head.

               I helped him up. “How long have you been sitting there?”

               “Just an hour or two,” he said, rubbing the side of his head. “I wanted to see you.”

               “I eat breakfast every morning, right there,” I reminded him, pointing to the dining table, visible from the hall. “You can see me all day. We’re all living on one floor of a psychiatric facility, remember?”

               He blushed and looked down at the floor. “Creepy?”

               “A little,” I admitted.

               “Sorry,” he said. “I guess three years in maximum security don’t make for stellar social skills.”

               I studied him, wondering if my own social skills were really anything to aspire to. I could count all my friends on one hand, and I only really liked one or two of them. “When are you going to tell me your life story?” I prodded.

               “Never,” he declared. “Case closed.”

               “Why?”

               “It’s not the kind of thing you tell people, like, out loud,” he said. “Trust me, you’re better off not knowing.”

               “I don’t mean to be annoying about it,” I said, haltingly. “But how are you going to get help if you can’t even talk about what happened to you?”

               “It’s not like it was some kind of sad trauma, alright?” he snapped. “It’s really fucked up and I can’t handle the idea of you knowing about any of it.”

               I rolled my tongue over my teeth, processing. “Okay.”

               He ran his fingers through his hair. “Sorry, I shouldn’t yell at you,” he mumbled.

               I leaned in, trying to get him to look at me. “If you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t talk about it,” I said softly.

               His eyes darted quickly up to my face and then back down. “I’m gonna get something from my room,” he said, and jogged down the hall.

               “Okay,” I said, although he was already out of earshot. “I’ll see you later.” Nathan looked really perturbed about something. Obviously, his past was a touchy subject, but he was _really_ touchy. _I hope he’s okay._ I looked through the doorway behind me. Nathan’s leather jacket still lay on the bed. I really didn’t want to give it back.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               Nathan didn’t show up to morning mindfulness exercises, which wasn’t unusual in and of itself, since morning mindfulness was framed as optional and he found it a nuisance most days. After a few minutes of meditation, my psychiatrist flagged me down for our appointment. I did a cursory search of my surroundings, but I saw no sign of him as I walked down the hall with Dr. Lewandowski to an empty office to talk.

               Lewandowski sat me down and told me she “no longer believed this medication to be beneficial” and that she was going to take me off of it immediately. She somehow managed to address the situation the day before without either apologizing for putting me on a medication that made me hysterical for 36 hours or mentioning Nathan at all. As the appointment wound down and Lewandowski asked if I had any questions, I said, “What happened with Nathan?”

               Lewandowski’s body language mirrored that of one who had bad gas. “Your friend came to me and made a strong, if inappropriately phrased, case for changing your medication.”

               My face registered shock. I read between the lines, of course: Nathan had tracked down my psychiatrist and completely lost his head. “That’s why he never came back for me?” I said. They must have restricted his privileges.

               “Let’s see how you do on this medication instead of the last one,” said the doctor, back to completely ignoring Nathan’s existence.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               Nathan was watching the world outside the dining room window.

“Hey, Nathan!” I called across the room, full of patients playing cards and reading magazines, leather jacket in hand. When he turned around I was already upon him.

“What’s up?” he said.

I planted a huge kiss on his cheek. “Thank you.”

He looked stunned. “Y-yeah…”

“I’m serious, thank you. You really didn’t have to scare the shit out of my psychiatrist.”

“Yes, I did,” he said darkly. “You should have seen yourself yesterday. I had to say something. They’ve grounded me from all outings for a few days, of course, but it’s mainly a nominal punishment.”

I was fighting a smile.

“Stop, I know what that face means,” he moaned. “There is nothing remotely cute about this.” He gestured to his own face and posture.

“It’s okay, I know you love me,” I joked. I held out the jacket. “Here.”

He had an expression on his face that I couldn’t quite pin down. He was staring at me. “You should keep it,” he said, intense blue eyes entrancing me as he stared me down. “It’s not like I can go outside for a while.”

I folded the jacket over my arm. “I’ll give it back when your punishment is over.”

“Nah, it looks better on you.” He was still staring at me.

               All the patients started shuffling toward the therapy room for group. “Ready to be constructive?” I said.

               “Yeah, let’s go spill our secrets,” he joked.

               As soon as we found seats in the circle of red couches and folding chairs, our group therapist, Dr. Crandall, stood up to address everyone. “Before we start, we’d like to make an announcement about some of our rules here at Kaplan-Jones,” she said. “We encourage you to interact and talk with each other, but we can’t have physical contact between patients. We have reason to believe this rule needs to be revived and reinforced.”

               The patients broke out in murmurs. A lot of them were staring – or glaring – at Nathan and me. “Did she just write a rule about us?” I whispered.

               “I think so,” said Nathan.

               “Now,” said Dr. Crandall brightly, as if she hadn’t just dropped a huge bomb on all of us. “Who has something to share this morning?”

               A nurse snuck up behind us. “Nathan, why don’t you sit on the other side of the circle for group from now on?”

               We both looked at her like she was insane. “What?” I said.

               “We’d like you guys to sit separately in groups from now on,” said the nurse, matter-of-factly.

               “It’s fine,” mumbled Nathan. “It’s not worth a fight.” He made the humiliating trek across the room full of seated people and squeezed in between Charlotte and Amanda, who both smiled nervously at him out of polite compulsion.

               “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s nothing subtle about what you’re doing,” I hissed at the nurse. She merely shrugged and exited the room.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               Group therapy the next day seemed to have a similar agenda. They split us up again, of course, but they also seemed to be picking on Nathan a lot.

               “Who wants to start?” said Dr. Crandall. “Nathan, we haven’t heard from you yet! Why don’t you share something about yourself?”

               “My name is Nathan and I’m here for treatment,” he mumbled.

               “Do you want to share what you’re in treatment for?” piped up a patient named Rob, a perpetually grumpy middle-aged man with seasonal depression. “You’ve never actually told us.”

               “I’d rather not talk about it,” said Nathan. I was getting nervous about how overwhelmed he looked. Group therapy really stressed him out.

               “Maybe it would feel good to get it out in the open,” said Dr. Crandall. God, did she _ever_ stop smiling? Botox injection technology has come a long way…

               “Hey,” I said, waving to get his attention across the circle. “Whatever happened, we have your back here. We’ve all been through something. You don’t have to be scared of judgement.” I was trying to make him less anxious, but I think I actually made it worse.

               As I spoke, Nathan looked disappointed, like he’d hoped I would stick up for him. Suddenly, I felt really bad for taking their side. His eyes said, _Backstabber_. He took a big breath. “I tried to kill myself and all I got was this cool tattoo,” he said, sardonically, rolling up his sleeves to expose the red scars up and down his arms.

               “That’s a good start,” said Dr. Crandall. “Would you like to talk about why you did it?”

               “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Nathan, through gritted teeth.

               “It might feel better to get it out in the open,” said Amanda, softly. She was only trying to help, but I didn’t envy her position after the withering death stare he gave her.

Frantically, he looked from person to person, looking for someone to stand up for him, but no one did. Including me. “Fine,” he said, sharply. “You all wanna know so bad? You really wanna know how Nathan Harris got himself checked in?” It was like the whole room was waiting with bated breath. No one was ruffling papers. Wide-eyed, we all stared at him.

               “We would love to hear your story,” said the doctor. She spoke the words calmly, but her affect was shaky and nervous. Clearly, she hadn’t thought her Put-Pressure-On-Nathan-Harris plan all the way through.

               “Great,” said Nathan. “I told the FBI about my persistent psychotic urges to murder sex workers and then I tried to slice myself to death with a box cutter.”

A few people shifted uncomfortably.

He continued, “I’ve been in a _real_ psychiatric institution with _real_ psych patients for three years. My release was contingent upon coming here for 60 days.”

“When you say, ‘real’ psychiatric institution and ‘real’ patients,” probed the doctor, still pretending she wasn’t literally quivering in her boots. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean I have yet to hear anyone say anything remotely interesting in this room,” he said.

My heartbeat felt like a hummingbird in my chest. _Psychosis?_

“When I get worked up, all I want to do is carve up a whore!” He was shaking slightly, or maybe vibrating. He laughed nervously, and I could see him coming apart at the seams. That’s when he said something that caught me off guard:

“I get crazy tunnel vision and it takes hours to come down. I see dead hookers every time I close my eyes, sliced up, with their hair chopped off. It never stops. The worst part is, I _fantasize_ about it. It makes me feel _good_ ,” he spat. It was different from talking in the common room or hanging out on the patio; it was venom. It was rage. That’s not what I was focused on, though. I replayed his words again in my mind.

“I hope you all sleep well in your unlocked rooms tonight,” he said, words directed at the other patients. “Do you see why I don’t tell people this stuff?”

I felt light-headed. My pulse was racing. _Those symptoms…_ I thought. _They sound like…_

_They sound like…_

“Me,” I choked out. All heads swiveled around to stare at me, including Nathan’s. His apprehension showed on his face, like he was afraid he’d broken me.

The doctor interjected, “Did something about Nathan’s experience resonate with you?”

I ignored her. I laughed through the tears welling up in my eyes and blurring the room.

Nathan couldn’t even look at me. He was shaking his head, staring at the floor between his knees, and pulling at his hair. “I’m so sorry, Jordan,” he mumbled. “God, I’m so sorry…”

“What’s the matter?” said the doctor, to no one in particular. (I think she was feeling a loss of control, and possibly some interpersonal frustration. I would have prescribed her a glass of wine and a template for a two-weeks’ notice.)

“I didn’t know there was anyone like _me_ ,” I blurted out, wiping the tears away.

Nathan hesitantly raised his head, desperate, distracting eyes trained on me. “What?” he said, voice breaking in the middle.

“That’s all the time we have today,” said the doctor irately.

Everyone booked it out of there and left Nathan and me alone. As if to make the point that she was pissed that we ruined her group session, the doctor turned off the lights as she left. We watched her go in bemusement, and then there was silence.

“Tell me,” whispered Nathan in the dark.

I stepped closer to him.

He stepped back.

“You’re no worse than I am,” I said, stepping forward again.

“I almost killed someone,” he said. He wouldn’t look at me.

“Me too.”

“I ruined my mother’s life,” he said.

“Me too,” I said, softly. I reached out and touched his cheek. “Look at me.” A small part of me wondered why no one was in the room with us, trying to enforce their new rule about touching, but then I remembered their penchant for embarrassing but ineffectual punishments.

“I can’t look at you,” whispered Nathan.

“Look at me,” I insisted.

As he did, the light from the chink in the door flooded his huge, watery-blue eyes. Eyes like that shouldn’t belong to a human being. Haltingly, he cupped his hands around the sides of my face, his thumbs gently wiping the tears from my cheeks. “God, I had no idea,” he breathed.

“I thought it was just me,” I confessed. My lip trembled and more tears spilled over my lash line.

“Please don’t cry?” he said, voice lifting at the end, like he was asking. His eyes were pleading.

“Okay,” I said, already crying. “Nathan, I’m sorry I took their side.”

“Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay.” He pulled me into a hug. “It’s okay.”

Back in my room, I flopped onto the bed face down and sobbed for half an hour. A nurse came in to find me after that, to see why I was missing music therapy.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

Only the soft murmurs of patients lounging in the common room penetrated the quiet on the ward after dinner. I had asked the nurses to open the art therapy room, the only place in the entire building where I ever felt like a human being. As I was painting the storm on the sea that I saw in my mind’s eye, someone else came into the room. “Hi Nathan.” I didn’t even have to look, to know who it was.

Nathan leaned on the edge of the table opposite me. “So…”

“So,” I repeated.

“A really intense thing happened,” said Nathan. “And we’re not talking about it.”

“Do you want to?” I dunked the paintbrush in the sink. The electric blue paint bled into the clear water in bright tendrils until the water was saturated.

He said nothing for a moment. “I don’t know what to say,” he said, quietly.

“You must be really pissed at all of us,” I remarked, finally meeting his eyes. “Years in serious facilities, and here we all are, moaning about our daddy issues and dragging our feet around the comparative equivalent of a five-star hotel.”

Nathan sighed. “Yeah, it’s a little annoying. But with you, it’s different.”

“I’m not sure I want to bond over psychotic urges,” I said, honestly.

He rubbed the back of his neck impatiently. “You think that’s why we’re friends?” He continued before I could get a word in edgewise. “We’re friends because you’re smart and hilarious, and because we trade drawings all day to make the time pass, and because we both think Law and Order: SVU is boring. If I had a phone, you’d be on my speed dial. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” He blushed hard and couldn’t look me in the eye.

“Okay.” I turned around and handed him the paintbrush I’d just washed.

He took the paintbrush from my hand. “I don’t know how to use this.”

“Painting is a lot like drawing, only painting is more about shapes than lines,” I explained. I picked up my recent creation by its edges and showed him what I meant. I pointed to the waves in the turbulent sea on the canvas, flinging sea foam into the air and drowning the small figure that reached desperately for something to hold onto. “Each wave is another big shape, and then the foam and the person are detail work. It takes some planning.”

He rolled up the sleeves of his button-down shirt and took the paintbrush from my hand. “Bring it on,” he said.

I fetched a canvas board from the cabinet. The art room was the only room in that stupid place where I felt like I could breathe. Somehow, having Nathan sitting across from me amplified its affect. Once he had the paint and the brushes in front of him, I think he relaxed a little as well.

“Your art style is really nice,” he said. “You know, I have some ideas for a graphic novel. Would you want to work on it with me, sometime?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What’s it about?”

“I was going to write it about Jack the Ripper,” he mumbled.

I pursed my lips. _Murdering prostitutes. Am I really surprised?_

“But I think I have a better idea now,” he added, hurriedly.

I looked up from my painting, waiting for the new idea.

“I’m not ready to tell you,” he said, enigmatically. “I’m not sure about it yet.”

I shrugged. It was decidedly _not_ the weirdest thing he had ever said. We painted in comfortable silence for a while.

“I think I’m getting the hang of this,” Nathan declared. He had an impish smirk on his face as he turned the canvas around to show me… myself.

“You painted a giant portrait of me,” I observed. There was something pretty about the way the colors flowed into one another.

“I couldn’t think of anything else.” I’ll never forget the ridiculous grin on his face as he stood there with an 11”x14” portrait of my face.

“You lied about not knowing how to paint, that’s for sure.” I dipped my brush in purple paint and reached over the table to paint the tip of his nose. “That’s what you get for playing me.”

“Hey!” Nathan ran around to my side of the table to exact revenge in lemon yellow on my chin, and after that, it devolved into a small war that lasted for 10 minutes and left both of us laughing harder than we could breathe in the empty art therapy room.

“C’mere.” I waved him over to me and snapped an illicit cell phone photo of the two of us, covered in paint and having the best night either of us had had in a really long time.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

              

               What goes up must come down. The Kaplan-Jones wing felt like a time capsule – like we were all in stasis. Nothing ever changed in the time capsule.

               Except for when it did.

               I was 18 days into my 30-day stay, pacing around the common room in between an unproductive visit with my assigned psychiatrist and dinner, when my pocket started vibrating. It had been weeks since I’d had any phone calls. I slipped into the dark art room to take the call. It was an unknown number. “Hello?”

               “Hello? This is Sandra Till, from the Creek-Handall Group. May I speak to Jordan Rowan?”

               “This is she,” I said, heart rate picking up. The Creek-Handall Group was supposed to pick up where the Kaplan-Jones program left off at the end of my interment. I was bound for a gratifying future of rigorous DBT treatment, with two groups and two individual therapy sessions every week and a close relationship with my psychiatrist, or so I thought.

               “I’ve reviewed your file,” said Sandra Till from the Creek-Handall Group. “And I don’t think you’re going to be a very good fit for our program.”

               My heart sank. “What do you mean?”

               “Well, like I said, I’ve been reviewing your file and I’ve spoken to your doctor,” she said. “And you’ve got some psychotic symptoms that seem to be problematic.” She didn’t ask me what I thought. She didn’t even sound like she cared very much.

               “I don’t know,” I stuttered, flashing back in my mind to everything Nathan had ever said about his symptoms. “M-maybe? But” –

               She interrupted, “We don’t take psychotics.”

               I could already feel myself starting to break down. Already, I could barely hold back the tears. “I’m going to call my dad. He’ll straighten this out.” It was a totally bratty thing to say, but I wanted to scare the shit out of that condescending bitch and invoking my father seemed to be the best way. “Thank you,” I trilled, in the brightest tone I could muster. Mental Patient Barbie. “Have a great day!” I hung up the phone.

               I did not call my dad. What I did was double over sobbing where I stood, feeling like the rug had been pulled out from under me. In some ways, it had. Where was I supposed to go if Creek-Handall, my only hope, didn’t want me? _“We don’t take psychotics.”_ Suddenly, my future was void. I couldn’t see past the door of Kaplan-Jones. I wandered up and down the entire length of the hall, from the front door to the laundry room and back, surroundings blurring into white noise. I recognized Nathan. “Hey,” he said.

               “Hey,” I croaked, and kept walking.

               _What goes up must come down_ , I thought. Then, I thought of the ugly chair in my room, and how the curtain rods were bolted securely to the walls.

               With some effort, I completely unmade the bed. What I wanted was the sheet. Do you see where I’m going with this? I’ll spare you the rest of that story. I’ll leave it at this: When the nurse came in to check on me on the hour and found me too hysterical to speak any language known to humankind and trying to wind a bedsheet around a curtain rod, all hell broke loose.

               I was too messed up from panic and psychosis to understand what anyone was saying, but they were all yelling at me, and then there were restraints and a stretcher and… that’s all I remember, until what I’m told was the next morning, when I woke up in a bed wearing a hospital gown and restrained in four places.

I wrinkled my nose. It smelled like disinfectant.

               I was told they’d have to keep me for at least 72 hours even though I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. I was back to passively wishing for death, but that wasn’t something I thought the doctor in charge of the psychiatric hall in the hospital needed to know. I was exhausted from thrashing around and screaming the night before, and my throat was raw. I closed my eyes, and they let me sleep. After 12 hours, they removed the restraints and told me it was 8:00pm: time for medication.

               “Can I call my parents?” I asked the nurse, my voice raspy from disuse. I sounded so small. I felt so small.

               I hung up on my dad as soon as I heard my mother sobbing in the background. _It doesn’t matter, they’re informed now. Hallelujah._ I gave the phone back to the nurse and closed my eyes for the next 10 hours, imagining all kinds of scenarios where I hadn’t tried to hang myself. Most of them involved Nathan in some capacity.

               _Nathan._

_I miss Nathan._

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               A nurse poked her head into the room. “You’ve got a visitor from Kaplan-Jones,” she said. “You up for it?”

               “Oh,” I mocked. “Are we done with solitary confinement?” Obviously, there were two other people in the room, but since both were borderline catatonic, I hadn’t counted them as people. My capacity for mocking was only at half-strength, but apparently even at partial capacity, I’m still a little shit.

The nurse pursed her lips. “I’ll bring him in,” she sighed. I briefly amused myself by wondering how many glasses of wine it was going to take to make up for her shitty shift. But I was allowed visitors!

I admit, I had very specific hopes for my visiting hours, and I wasn’t disappointed. “Knock knock,” came a male voice from the doorway.

“Who’s there?” I burrowed under my blanket, suddenly self-conscious of my knotted hair and how bad I must have smelled.

“Nathan. You really don’t remember me?” the bed sank where he sat on the edge.

I peered at him. “That’s a terrible joke.”

He had a weak smile on his face and his eyes were redder than usual. “It’s not a joke,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’m too tired to come up with anything good.”

“Jesus, did you sleep at all last night?”

“No.”

I looked him up and down. I suspected that he also hadn’t changed clothes in 36 hours (He was still wearing the purple sweater vest and the white button-down, although he definitely looked better than me. I was wearing a hospital gown and almost nothing else, which didn’t do much for the humiliation factor of this visit.). I sat up in bed and looked down at my lap as I briefly ran my fingers through my wild hair. “Nathan,” I started, but stopped when I looked back up and caught him wiping his eyes. “Nathan?” I said, softer.

He turned his head away silently.

“I’m okay,” I said, almost a whisper.

He looked at me again, only for a second, and then averted his eyes once more. “Yeah, for now.”

“We’re mental patients,” I sighed. “’For now’ is the best we’ve got. Why won’t you look at me? Is my hair really that bad?”

He cracked a reluctant smile. It was small, but definitely a real one. He reached out and ruffled my hair. “It’s just messy in the back. It’s not that bad.”

“No touching,” I reminded him, mockingly.

“Shut up,” he said. “You know, you always have really cute bedhead.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I said, a mischievous grin manifesting on my face. “Did you forget to bring your hairbrush to Kaplan-Jones, or do you not own one?”

Nathan tried to smooth out his own messy hair. His face reddened slightly. “You’re a real smartass, you know that?” He grabbed my hand and examined my hospital bracelet. “Are they keeping you in this bed for two days?”

“Just for observation. They said I’ve already been here for the initial 24-hour watch period, and since I’m not throwing things or trying to strangle myself with a bedsheet, I’m guessing they’ll let me out in another 12 or so.” As he intertwined his fingers with mine, I belatedly realized he had no interest in my hospital bracelet. I squeezed his hand. It felt good to touch somebody who wasn’t taking my blood pressure. I wondered how much physical contact we could get away with. They’d probably drag him out of the room if I ran into his arms and sobbed into his collar like I wanted to.

When I tore my gaze away from his hand and looked at his face again, I suddenly wasn’t so sure he wasn’t on the same train of thought. “I asked one of the nurses about the psychiatric ward here and she said they don’t have one,” he said, conversationally, in stark contrast with the pulse I could feel between my fingers that I wasn’t sure was even mine, and the silent woman in the next bed who was restrained at the wrists. “I suppose this is what she meant.” He made a cursory sweep of the room with his eyes.

“They must reroute most of the psych patients to the next hospital,” I replied, playing along with the conversation thing.

“Oh, hey,” said Nathan, reaching with his unoccupied hand for a folded piece of paper at the foot of my bed. “Charlotte made you this. The nurses on this ward said it’s okay to show you as long as I bring it with me when I leave.”

I smiled when he showed me the drawing. “Charlotte is crazy talented,” I said. A night sky unfolded before me, swaths of glitter in perfect swirls across a sea of silver stars. The crescent moon was a cutout from the page. I flipped it over. The back read, “Carry on, dear! You can do this,” and was signed by a handful of the other patients. “I wish they’d let me keep it,” I murmured.

“I’ll hold onto it until you get back to Kaplan-Jones,” said Nathan.

               I nodded. “It’ll be in good hands.”

               He wrapped his other hand around my hand, the one with the hospital bracelet, as if he was afraid we’d be ripped apart. His lips quivered helplessly, and this time, as a tear rolled down his cheek, he bowed his head and pressed them to my hand, held so tightly between his own. His eyes were closed, as if in prayer. Nathan hated closing his eyes more than anything in the world. His eyelashes fluttered.

               “Nathan,” I whispered. “What do you see?”

               He took a deep, shaky breath and opened his eyes. “I see you,” he choked out. “I see you all the time.”

               My heartbeat picked up sharply. _Me? Dead, with my hair chopped off?_ A tiny part of my mind hoped it wasn’t like that. Hoped that these thoughts came from a nice, welcome place in his head, not a violent one. Hoped that my smile appeared in his cereal in the morning and my voice followed him through every mindfulness exercise we did. Hoped he fell asleep with me every night.

               “I need to tell you something,” he said.

               The nurse came in and cut him off. “It’s time to go, Nathan.”

               He took another deep, shaky breath and kissed my hand. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, wiping his face with his sleeve.

               “Nathan,” I said, desperately, as he got up to leave, taking Charlotte’s drawing with him.

               On his way out the door, he turned.

               I couldn’t even figure out how to word the things I wanted to say. “Go change clothes,” I said, weakly.

               The corner of his mouth lifted, and he bowed his head in acknowledgement. Then, he was gone.

               A nurse came in to take my vitals. Apparently, my blood pressure was elevated.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               My release back into Kaplan-Jones was conditional. I would undergo a psychological evaluation before leaving the hospital, I would see my psychiatrist every single day, and the nurses at Kaplan-Jones would check on me every 15 minutes. The psychological evaluation included a questionnaire and an interview with a psychiatrist from the general hospital. They must have been satisfied that I didn’t want to kill myself anymore, because they released me that same day. I was more embarrassed than anything else. I should have called my dad and explained the problem instead of trying to hang myself from a curtain rod.

               You have to understand, when the woman from Creek-Handall called me and told me I couldn’t enter their program, I was devastated in a unique way. I had been told over and over again that after Kaplan-Jones, I was going into the Creek-Handall DBT program. It was my only option, as far as I knew. When Sandra Till told me that the place I was counting on to save my life couldn’t accept me, I couldn’t handle it. Regardless, it was a really dumb thing to do, and besides, the Kaplan-Jones bedsheets are too thick to be effective for suicide.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               As soon as I was back in the Kaplan-Jones hallway, settled and clear on what I wasn’t allowed to do (anything fun), I scoured the facility in search of Nathan. I peered into the laundry room, but all I found was a noisy load of clothes tumbling around in the dryer. He wasn’t in the common room, watching other people play Monopoly, or hiding behind a book in his room. I even checked the patio. Finally, I found myself standing at the big, heavy door of the group therapy room. I opened the big doors. “Nathan?” I whispered.

               I heard a sniff from the other side of one of the couches. I crept up and looked over the back of the sofa apprehensively. Nathan sat curled up under the windowsill, doodling with a ballpoint pen. When he saw me, he snatched up the papers. “Hey,” he said.

               “Hey.” I pointed to the papers in his hands. “Are you working on your graphic novel?”

               “Yeah, I’ve got a few ideas down.” He shuffled the papers into a pile.

               “I get the feeling you’re not going to show me, so I’m not going to ask,” I said pointedly. “But I think it’s really cool that you’re working on it. Your drawings are amazing, so I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

               “Thanks. I’m glad you’re back,” he grunted, standing up and stretching.

               “I missed you,” I said, as we headed for the common room to see if the common room was empty enough to watch crime procedurals with the sound muted and come up with funnier lines.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

              

               I was at the tail end of my stay at Kaplan-Jones. It was surreal; in three days, I’d walk out of that door at the end of the hall with all of my belongings and my DBT binder and be a part of the world again. I didn’t know what I was going to do, since my Creek-Handall plan had fallen through, but I’d be sleeping in my own bed, in my own messy room, eating my own food and not being checked on every 15 minutes by nurses. I wanted to leave, but somehow I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t ready to leave. There was something I had to do first. I told Dr. Lewandowski this, and she suggested I make lists of everything I did at Kaplan-Jones and use the process of elimination to figure out exactly what it was that I hadn’t done.

               I knelt by the coffee table and made a list on the back of someone’s abandoned zentangle.

               Someone flopped into the armchair behind me. The chair made a scrunchy sound.

               “Hi Nathan.” I didn’t even have to look anymore. Nathan was the only patient who wanted anything to do with me, and vice-versa. “I’m making a list to try and figure out why I feel weird about leaving Kaplan-Jones.”

               “My doctor thinks I’m in love with you,” he grumbled.

               “Aren’t you?” I said, without thinking.

               He whipped his head around. “What?”

               “Nathan, I’m leaving in a few days,” I reminded him. “If you have anything to say, this is when you say it.”

               He looked really upset about something, but he was struggling to talk about it.

               “Just think about it, okay? Unless I’m wrong,” I said. “And you don’t want to keep in touch with me, and I’ll just leave.” The idea of leaving, and just leaving him there, made me feel sick to my stomach.

               Laboriously, he got the words out: “You’re not… wrong.”

               At that precise moment, a yoga instructor and several students with yoga mats barged into the room and commandeered it to meditate in.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               We passed the next two days speaking relatively few words to each other, interspersed amongst long, sad silences. Nathan spent most of his free time in the art therapy room and I didn’t want to bother him. I wished there was something I could say to fix everything, to put us back together, but that didn’t seem possible anymore.

               And as far as what was making me anxious about leaving, well, that one was obvious at that point.

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

               My dad was standing by the door with my packed suitcases and I was signing discharge papers and retrieving my medications from the nursing station. I kept turning back, craning my neck, but it looked like I was on my own. My face was hot and my chest constricted. It was like his beautiful blue eyes were watching me from above and laughing at my stupidity, thinking I’d ever see them again.

               “Jordan?”

               I turned around sharply. “Huh?”

               It was him. “I came to say goodbye,” he said. He was carrying something flat under one arm, which he held up to face me. It was an 18”x24” acrylic painting of me on a canvas board.

               I was dumbstruck. Gingerly, I took the painting from his hands.

               “You don’t have to take it with you,” he said. “But I kind of hope you do. See,” he explained. “Every time I have an episode, lately, I draw a picture of your face. It’s like the frequency gets turned down on all the bad stuff.”

I broke my stunned silence to say, “That’s a DBT skill, right? Distractions.” That wasn’t what I actually wanted to say.

               He chuckled. “I guess it’s rubbing off on me after all.”

I grabbed a pamphlet off a side table and scrawled my phone number across the top. “Call me when you get a phone,” I stressed. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say, either.

               “I will,” said Nathan.

               “I have something for you as well,” I said.

I tried to give him his brown leather jacket, but he shook his head. “You can give it back when I get out of here,” he said. “Hey, by the way, these are for you, too.” He produced several pages of scribbled storyboard. “This is my graphic novel concept. A couple of psychos meet in a hospital and… uh…” He paused, nervously. “At least one of them falls seriously in love.”

I looked at the designs. “How does it end?” Again, not what I actually wanted to say.

He shifted nervously. “I don’t know yet.”

“How about they get out of the hospital and get ice cream together at this place I know downtown?” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “That’d make a great, uh, plot point.”

“I’ll see you on the outside,” I said. “And I’ll hold you to that ice cream date.” I walked to the end of the hall, right up to that door... And then I looked back. Nathan was watching me leave, hands in his pockets. A pang of sadness struck me as I realized I was leaving him alone.

“Wait,” I said to my dad, and turned around. I ran back down the hall to where Nathan was, and the nurses could only watch helplessly as I ran into his arms and kissed him on the lips. He pulled me closer and kissed me again.

               “I love you,” said Nathan, breathlessly.

               “Get out of here in one piece, okay?” I breathed. I kissed him one more time. “I love you, too.” And _that_ was what I wanted to say.

               And then, I walked out that door.

 

=_---==-_~=-==-~-=_=

 

**_“Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified.”_ **

**_― Susanna Kaysen_ **


End file.
